Son Lux, We Are Rising

Art, Direction, Album Art, Graphic Design

Art Direction, Graphic Design

When Ryan asked us to make the artwork for the new Son Lux album 'We Are Rising' — which he wrote and recorded in just 28 days (as part of NPR’s RPM Challenge in February) — we decided to set ourselves the kinda-ridiculous challenge of doing the entire project—from build-out to photoshoot to final design and layout—in only 28 hours.

The album has these persistent themes of vapors, ephemerality, and, of course, the idea of rising throughout both the lyrics and the music itself. We liked the idea of juxtaposing the ephemeral and uncontrollable colorful smoke against the rigid and static flat grid of 28 cans, each representing one day of the album's production time. It felt like a representation of the chaotic ephemeral beauty of the music emerging from the rigid form and time-constraits of its production.

And then finally the Son Lux name itself is not imposed but rather emerges from the contrast between two points in time — the negative space of the letters shows the beginning of the rising, and the background shows some moments later at the end as the smoke cloud starts to coalesce into something larger than its parts.